A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works?
Unusual for fiction at the time and practically unknown today, “Life in the Iron Mills” actually opens with a rhetorical question. But it is a rhetorical question that does not fit with the contemporary definition of being a question that is asked without expecting an answer. While it is the first such example of this device, it is far from being the last. The story is told by a rather typical 19th century style narrator who metaphorically stops telling his story to directly speak to the reader. This and other rhetorical questions serve a very definite purpose: prodding readers to step out of their own circumstances to look at life from the perspective of the lives the characters lead. A cloudy day in Atlanta, San Francisco or Denver is not the exact same thing as a cloudy day in a mill town.
The few hours for rest he spent hewing and hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his watch came again,—working at one figure for months, and, when it was finished, breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to feed his soul in grossness and crime, and hard, grinding labor.
Hugh Wolfe is persistently presented as a figure of isolation, alienated from those he works alongside, but also not allowed to fit into the higher sphere of men like Mitchell. Even as Doctor May is recognizing Hugh’s talent at sculpture described above, he is described by the narrator as talking down to Hugh as one would to a child. Academics applying an autobiographical approach to interpretation has suggested that within these lines can be found the thirty-year-old unpublished writer of the story who after graduating as valedictorian spent the next thirteen years in isolation, observing and dreaming of becoming an author.
Mitchell started back, half-frightened, as, suddenly turning a corner, the white figure of a woman faced him in the darkness,—a woman, white, of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture of warning.
Although Hugh’s hunchbacked and devotedly loyal cousin Deborah is typically considered as what might be the termed the “co-protagonist” of the story, a convincing argument can be made that the statue of the woman Hugh crafts out of the substance called korl is actually the most significant female character. “Life in the Iron Mills” is significantly more conscious of gender than it would likely be if written by a man. The milieu of mill workers is one dominated by masculinity to the point where one hardly even expects gender fluidity to be raised today, much less in a story written at the outbreak of the Civil War. Raised the issue is, however, most directly in the form of the other mill workers referring to Hugh as androgynous appearance with the insult “Molly Wolfe.” But gender is also subtly situated as an issue here in the description of the first encounter with the statue created by Hugh that will play such a huge role in the narrative. The reaction of Mitchell is unexpected and almost shocking precisely on the issue of conventional expectations based upon gender.
To Hugh: “Do you know, boy, you have it in you to be a great sculptor, a great man? Do you understand? To live a better, stronger life.”
As Hugh listens “You know, Mitchell, I have not the means. You know, if I had, it is in my heart to take this boy and educate him for—”
In a way, Doctor May is the fulcrum upon which the entire narrative rests. With the words spoken directly to Hugh, the lever of Hugh’s potential future rises higher than he had ever dared hope. Then, mere moments later, his words to Mitchell pushes down the weight on the opposite side as he unwittingly becomes an element in the complex mechanism leading Hugh to his doom.
